Talk:Canon

I was quite surprised that nobody had done this article yet so I thought I’d have a go. Given the potential arguments that this topic might cause, I have tried to be as uncontroversial as possible and stick to the ‘facts’.

I have never heard of (and been unable to find) any official canon policy from Hasbro (beyond the Universe thing mentioned in the article) and so until someone enlightens me otherwise I assumed that there isn’t one.

There is a G1 bias to the article as that’s where my knowledge mainly lies so someone might want to add in some later stuff for balance.

I look forward to the inevitable rewrites.Omnisvalidus 20:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

The main reason you've not been able to find any offical canon policy from Hasbro is that there is none. With Transformers, the closest thing to "Is this cannon?" is "Is this piece of fiction licensed or produced by Hasbro or TakaraTomy?" --FortMax 20:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this page definately needs a note that it's not spelled "cannon".--66.237.45.7 00:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Ask and you shall receive. Omnisvalidus 10:31, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Blogs and Q&A sessions as canon.

I disagree with events that happen only in a blog or Q&A session being treated as canon. I am thinking of event "Rodimus Prime (Animated) survived the cosmic rust attack and is recovering". "Rodimus in recovery" is an event that only happened in a Q&A session. The event never happened in fiction. Now I agree that a blog or Q&A session can clarify something that was seen, like, "was that Alpha Trion we saw?" but I don't think it can introduce a new event.

Another example would be Hail and Farewell. Simon Furman explicitly said that was canon in a blog post, but now the editors say it was never canon and the events have been contradicted all over the place. - Starfield 12:42, 28 April 2009 (EDT)

I take them as canon if they conform with matters of basic fact. Derrick Wyatt said Animated Rodimus will reappear in an upcoming episode, just as he had also said Sari's key will not. If that eventually comes true, then he was just giving us sneak previews a few weeks in advance--and we've been accepting stuff like that for years. Problems arise when you get into the issue of "author intent", when something they say goes further than or even in contradiction with what the actual series material showed. If Rodimus never shows up again, then we really can't conclude he was cured of his rust after all. Derrick wanted crushed-cube Blurr to have a pulsing spark drawn inside it, making him unambiguously alive--but the series didn't show that, so given the internal context it's at least as likely that he's dead (especially if he's never explicitly brought back to life). The same thing goes for Furman. If there's an internal contradiction within the stories, that can't be magically handwaved away just based on which of the authors seems to want it more. Ideally, there would have been nothing in "Farewell" that explicitly contradicted the comics and so it could have just been fit inoffensively between-the-scenes, but apparently that's just not true anymore. We may be looking at another Alignment here, where Furman very much has his own ideas on what happened but not enough of it was ever published (or published coherently) to make it definitively "true." --Thylacine 2000 12:56, 28 April 2009 (EDT)

Can Paramount influence canon on its own?

The rules for canon are "If it was released by a Transformers licensor with Hasbro approval, then it is canonical." What if Paramount does something without Hasbro's approval? They seem to be a special case being co-producers of Transformers major motion pictures. I'm wondering about Bendy-Bus Prime. The news articles don't mention Hasbro at all, so it looks like Paramount might have done that all by themselves. If Hasbro didn't give approval, would he be non-canon, even though he was made by the producers of Transformers films? - Starfield 00:56, 18 December 2010 (EST)

I woulda thought that Hasbro would have to give their approval for anything Paramount did with the Transformers. Sure, the Bendy-Bus Prime news items don't mention Hasbro, but I'd be surprised if the idea wasn't passed by Hasbro beforehand. --abates 02:04, 18 December 2010 (EST)

I suspect that over the years a lot has been done by licensees without having every single addition to the mythos specifically rubber stamped in advance. However Paramount are a fairly experienced company when it comes to intellectual property and it's doubtful they'd do this sort of thing without at least having a licence. Timrollpickering 07:59, 24 February 2011 (EST)

But what does the licence cover? Hasbro's intellectual property for sure. But it seems like Paramount would be free to go about promoting its Transformers movies without it necessarily falling under license, which may or may not involve a promotion in England involving an original character named "Bendy-Bus Prime." Who knows. - Starfield 23:24, 26 March 2011 (EDT)

We generally tend to assume that the license carries with it tacit Hasbro approval, and thus chronicle these things anyway. At worst, it's a microcontinuity.--Rosicrucian^Talk 02:11, 27 March 2011 (EDT)

Licensed but non-canon?

Does anything fall into the category of non-canon TF fiction, despite being officially licensed? i seem to recall that Hasbro allowed IDW (or was it Fun Publications) to print Mosaics, although only considering select Mosaics to be canon? Also, the use of footage from the G1 cartoon in the Animated cartoon comes to mind--didn't Hasbro say that was just an Easter egg, and not canon? Then there's Robo-Capers, Grim Grams and other letters pages... 70.17.200.179 01:15, 21 September 2011 (EDT)

retcon, microcontinuity, or personal canon?

IDW's graphic novelization of the 1986 G1 movie added/"clarified"/"corrected" some details--off the top of my head, 1) the battle at the Ark including Omega Supreme and some of the Scramble City combiners, 2) who Unicron reformatted into whom, and 3) a pair of Constructicons instead of one Constructicon and one Insecticon menacing the Human germ on the Planet of Junk.

Is the graphic novel a retcon of the movie, or a microcontinuity closely related to the movie? or is that a question only personal canon can answer?

70.17.200.179 01:22, 21 September 2011 (EDT)

It doesn't change any facts in the movie. Everything you see in the movie still actually happened in the movie. And what you see happening in the IDW adaptation happened in the IDW adaptation. You know what? This wiki should say more about adaptations. It is a little more complicated than "everything is canon." Adaptations are supposed to simply be the movie in comic or novel form, so they aren't supposed to be in a different continuity. Theoretically anyway. There is no denying there are continuity differences. One way to handle it is to simply regard differences in the adaptation as errors. That might work for some adaptations, but I think (I could be mistaken) in the IDW live-action comics, they sometimes refer to events in their comic adaptation which were different from the movie, so those adaptations are in a slightly different continuity. But in things like the Marvel 86 movie adaption, maybe the conflicts are closer to being errors.

And what about additional information that doesn't actually conflict, like the battle at the Ark? I think that since the adaption is supposed to be the events of the movie in comic form, so it does actually retcon those events. Omega Supreme really did fight combiners at the Ark. - Starfield 10:53, 21 September 2011 (EDT)

Adaptation or no, I think the microcontinuity explanation is the best one we have. Most (all?) adaptations have differences from the final product, some of them major. Since they are, in fact, a valid and licensed Transformers story, they need to be documented somewhere. I don't agree about what adaptations are supposed to be, supposed to do. According to who? Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and good creators take advantage of them. Peter David lets you peer inside the heads of his characters during the novel, which the movie couldn't do. He makes little tweaks, changes a few things here and there. And, of course, he works from an earlier draft of the script than the final product, so that causes some changes too. Calling all those changes 'errors' rather misses the point, I think. Why is it an error for Megatron and Optimus to make peace in the DotM novelization? (I'm reminded of Clerks. "I'm calling to see if this article is a misprint.")

I also don't think, for the most part, adaptations can 'correct' earlier works, not if they're published in a different media. (For example, I think that the Tommy Kennedy televised version of the Movie probably IS in continuity, so things like labeling certain events 'Day 1', 'Day 2' are probably canon for the movie itself and not some microcontinuity.) While I'm sure that Bob and Don knew what they were doing when they added in some scenes of their own, I don't think you can definitively say that now this is what happened in the movie. (Unless, I suppose, there was some kind of note from the editor stating something to the effect of that. Sort of the reverse of the David Cian note in Transformers Legends.)

Now, there's the practical aspect of 'do we want to have three different articles for The Transformers: The Movie that all say almost the exact same thing?' To that, I'd suggest that probably no, we don't, so simply listing out how the adaptation differs from the primary work is enough. --Jimsorenson 14:45, 21 September 2011 (EDT)